Boasting of about 2 billion visitors per day, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world, making it an ideal medium for advertising and marketing. If a company wants to generate curiosity about their product among the customers before its launch, a video on YouTube has the ability to gather attention of the required target audience without opting for traditional advertising mediums such as television and print. Boasting of about 2 billion visitors per day, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world, making it an ideal medium for advertising and marketing.

If a company wants to generate curiosity about their product among the customers before its launch, a video on YouTube has the ability to gather attention of the required target audience without opting for traditional advertising mediums such as television and print. Owing to its wide reach, YouTube videos are viewed by several hundred customers every passing minute. However, the reach of the video depends on its quality. Additionally, a YouTube video serves many other purposes which can summarised as:

 It educates people about the product

 It demonstrates the product applications

 Adds a fun element with the help of creative animations and typography

 Engages customers who may not be interested in the product

 Create audio-visual medium to attract specific target audience

The rising importance of YouTube

The key element for companies to increase their online presence is to ensure that customers view and share their content. YouTube provides a platform to promote, share and comment on a video, which enables companies to communicate their product easily to a wide range of customers. YouTube is emerging as one of the most successful tools for product promotion due to the following reasons:

Product promotion

Businesses find it easier to promote their product with a simple video that showcases the benefits of their product. The quality of the content and graphics play a vital role to attract visitors to share and comment for the company to receive valuable feedback.

Gain Feedback:

The most crucial aspect for development of any company is to gain feedback about their product. YouTube videos help to identify whether the product is a success or failure with the number of views and comments from the visitors.

Wider Reachability:

It is not always possible to connect with customers from remote locations. YouTube videos help to gain access to such customers and promises to increase the customer base.

Address Grievances:

Many businesses are unable to reach out to clients to resolve their queries and problems. As YouTube videos enable viewers to comment on the video, any grievances can be addressed systematically.

Brand Promotion:

In order to increase the brand visibility, companies enable viewers to comment on the videos and let them share the videos across various social media platforms. This helps viewers to make an informed choice before purchasing a product as well as help companies promote their brand.

YouTube Insight:

In addition to comments received on videos, YouTube insights provides a statistical input that enables companies to track the number of visitors viewing the video. This helps companies to analyse the success or failure of their YouTube campaign.

Increase website traffic:

Website links are displayed on videos which help to generate traffic towards the company website. This, eventually helps in diverting traffic from the YouTube video to the main website.

Save on cash:

Advertising through traditional means of advertising is possible only for companies with a big budget. There are no charges to upload a video on YouTube. Even with no cost undertaken, companies generate huge traffic towards their website, which results in higher profitability with least investment.

Advertise on YouTube

With millions of viewers active on YouTube every day, it becomes an attractive platform for companies to advertise their product since several options are available depending on the type of advertising campaign.

Establishing relationship with customers

A video can go Viral

Since there are numerous examples on how YouTube videos go viral, this invariably gives companies the scope to receive views from millions of customers. A video that has a bit of humour, is unique and generates a buzz in the market, such a video is shared numerous times on various Social Media Platforms generating a significant amount of traffic to the company website.

Address customer comments

If a business is promoting its product on YouTube, there will be certain queries in the form of comments. The company can address these queries by asking questions, providing step by step solutions and add links which can direct them to the related video that solve the problem. Companies must ensure that the answers to the queries are to the point to maintain their YouTube customer base.

Ask customers to Subscribe

To increase the subscriber base of a YouTube Channel, companies can urge their viewers to press the subscribe button at the end of videos. Subscribing a video enables the viewers to stay updated with all the videos that will be uploaded by the company in future.

Add website link to videos

Adding the link of the website in the start and end of the video gives the viewer information about the company. Placing the website link of the company helps divert traffic from YouTube to the website which in turn increases website traffic. There are widgets and buttons which enable the user to place the website URL in the YouTube video.

Key statistics on YouTube marketing

Social Media marketing in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, Nottingham and several cities in UK have created a significant platform for businesses to market their product on the digital medium. As highlighted earlier on the important benefits of marketing a product through YouTube, listed below are some key statistics which makes YouTube a reliable and dependable platform to save cost and market products efficiently:

 World over, people watch 6 Billion hours of video on YouTube every month

 The average YouTube session on mobile is now 40 minutes

 1 Billion people across the world use YouTube every month

 400 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube every minute

 1 hour of video is uploaded on YouTube EVERY SECOND!

 YouTube is localized in 61 countries and across 61 languages

Most successful YouTube campaigns

With YouTube providing a vast platform to advertise, the manner in which a video is created with unique ideas leads to an uproar in the world of Social Media. Given below are some successful YouTube campaigns which captured the attention of millions of YouTube viewers within minutes.

Dove – Real women, real rewards

Dove, with their ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ campaign created a significant impact in promoting their product. The video received about 114 million views within the first month itself. This video was available in 25 languages on 33 official YouTube channels reaching consumers in over 110 countries.

Evian – the inner child that keeps on giving

Evian’s campaign of ‘baby and me’ depicts adults in their baby avatars. The campaign received 100 million view in weeks with frequent updates on their Facebook page and various other promotional tools.

Lay’s – Crowdsourced crunch

Lay’s ‘Do us a Flavor’ was a campaign asking customers to suggest a new flavor for the potato chip brand and gave the customers an opportunity to win 1 million dollars. There were about 4 million suggested flavors sent through Facebook and SMS’s. The campaign increased their fan base three-folds and led to over 12% rise in sales across the USA.

Always #LikeAGirl

With equality campaigns creating a frenzy in 2014, ‘Always #LikeAGirl’ received 53.5 Million views on YouTube leading the ‘Always’ brand to gain immense popularity across the world.

Author Bio:

Bal Rai is an Internet Marketing Consultant at eTrack Media, a leading SEO Company in Mumbai that provides the best search optimisation services, social media marketing services, and web design and development services to full-service marketing firms as well as end clients.